Fixing my dryer with a circular saw, a cordless drill, and green paint.

Early in our marriage, I bought my husband a very large, Amish-made, wooden clothes drying rack.  He'd swooned when describing his memories of a similar one in his past, and not like I was jealous or anything, but I am darned competitive at times, and I didn't want to be beaten out by a former spouse on something as vital to a marriage as where he'd hang our undergarments.  So when I found this big and beautiful beast, I bought it.  It was pricey for a drying rack --- $40?  $60?  I don't exactly remember, but I love my husband that much, you know, so I was totally willing to shell out the big bucks to make him happy.  

My husband is the Lord of the Laundry, the kind of guy who jumps up mid-dinner to run down into the basement because the electric dryer is done and he doesn't want the clothes to wrinkle.  He uses the wooden rack mostly for delicates like bike clothes, and has mostly used the electric dryer for everything else, except when I can convince him to hang things (which he complains get "crunchy").  In the humid summer, we'll move the wooden rack outdoors to increase airflow and decrease drying time.  

MiserMom-themed comments, because I can't help myself.  When my husband is out of town for extended periods, our household electrical use drops by almost half.  The TV and the electric dryer use that much energy.  I myself don't use the electric dryer for anything besides killing bed bugs.  

At any rate, back to the main topic.   This drying rack has outlasted several electrical dryers and is older than some of my kids, so it's no surprise that it's started to break down just a tad here and there, not unlike its owners, I guess.   Fortunately, fixing a wooden drying rack is Heck-Way easier than fixing an electric dryer (although the latter is also frequently quite possible, thanks to the modern miracle of You-Tube videos).  

Last week, when I was supposed to be taking care of paperwork related to a jazillion committees I seem to be on, somehow I couldn't get my head into those.  So I headed into the basement, where I used my circular saw to trim down a pair of new dowel rods to the right length, and then use my cordless drill to attach them in place of the two broken rods, using the screws I'd rescued from disassembling a trash-picked dining room table (now a bookshelf).  

And then, since my head seemed to be happier playing with the drying rack than writing committee reports, I decided to paint the drying rack.  It used to be wood-colored, and then it was ugly-gray-wood-exposed-to-the-elements-colored, but now it's green.  

 Here's a dog's-eye view of the drying rack,
as seen from the balcony where Prewash and I like to hang out.

A drying rack has a lot of surface area to paint, let me tell you.  That's about 8 hours of committee work that I didn't do, right there.  But my husband likes the way the drying rack looks, and nobody reads my committee memos anyway, so I think I made a good choice.